Please join the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis, for “Uncraft 2: The Terror of Materials”, a reading and conversation with guest artist Judith Goldman, on her book agon. Photo credit: Bruce Jackson.

Register for this event to receive the Zoom link details. This talk is free and open to the public.

Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, agon is a work of broken genres that explores “weaponization” as a totalizing trope implicating poetic materialism with the unconventional, inventive violences emerging from post-9/11 war profiteering, torture practices, and neoliberal corrosion of the commons. In this oppressive ambience of “toxic implicature,” even our critique is bound to the spectacle of weaponization. Correspondingly, Goldman attempts an object-oriented response to ambient aggressivity, less to find an impossible “outside” to this annihilative field of relations, and more to test points of resistance to infinite regress of unbearable agonisms.

June 3, 2021: Judith Goldman

Judith Goldman is author of four books of poetry: Vocoder (Roof 2001); DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006); l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya 2011); and agon (The Operating System 2017). Her collaborative, multimedia, full gallery installation Open Waters [Northwest Passage | Open Polar Sea | Arctic + Great Lakes Plastic] showed at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo in Winter 2019-2020. She is core faculty in and Director of the Poetics Program at SUNY, Buffalo, and is Poetry Features Editor for Postmodern Culture.

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from The Convergence Zone is a series of author readings, and artist talks and performances, sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. It brings together sometimes peaceable, sometimes combustible, fronts of discovery and experiment. This series brings to the (virtual) Seattle metropolitan area exciting writers and artists who "cross" and "trans" genres and media. It discusses and performs written arts in an expanded field.